Re: Cairo bindings and e-mail license virus bombs

[Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>]

sbelmont700@gmail.com writes:

> A license is not an inherent part of a file (any file); the license is
> something you and the vendor agree to, whether via a webpage,
> handshake, signed contract, or whatever.  Binary libraries, for
> example, don't have any licensing information 'in' them, yet whatever
> terms you and vendor come to is what's in effect, essentially forever,
> assuming that it's legal in the first place.  Nobody can change this
> after the fact.

Binary libraries are irrelevant here.

Look at the FSF's page on "How to use GNU licenses for your own
software"[1]:

   "Whichever license you plan to use, the process involves adding two
   elements to each source file of your program: a copyright notice
   (such as "Copyright 1999 Terry Jones"), and a statement of copying
   permission, saying that the program is distributed under the terms of
   the GNU General Public License (or the Lesser GPL)."

And you _should_ include a copy of the licenses, but if you don't the
notice should say where to get them from.

So if AdaCore are releasing their code under the GPL they ought to
conform to the general policies of the FSF. And if the code they make
available contains the GCC Runtime Library Exception then it just
does. There are several remedies: one of those would be to take down the
publicly-visible anonymous repos.

They already recognise this in the GPL compiler suite by stripping the
exception out of the source files.

[1] http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html